Forty
What does it even mean to be a Godly woman? (Part 9)
(As hard as it was to not have the time and space for my weekly Quiet Writing Times over the last two months, I’m finding it somewhat apropos to be “coming back” to this space on my fortieth birthday. Nothing like squarely hitting your middle age to look back on the previous decades and analyze where you’ve come from and look ahead to where you’re going. And here, we have some of the first truly rainstorm-y weather of the year, so it’s perfect for that kind of writing.)
For my birthday, I did my traditional Instagram post, and this is what it said this year:
“This is 40.
“This morning I put on a favorite pretty dress, and went to our beloved Anglican church. Per the normal, the service was so life-giving, and during the entire time there, I had so many people ask after my three-days-post-shoulder-surgery husband, and let me know they were praying for both of us. The love and care was palpable.
“After lunch and clean-up, always slightly chaotic in a family of nine, I opened gifts. Per the normal, books and beauty figured heavily into things, and as this was my first birthday where multiple of my children bought gifts, it was fun to see what they chose.
“Gifts opened, I headed up to my room for the first Quiet Writing Time I’ve been able to have in two months, getting ready to listen to my favorite hoodie with ‘I like good strong words that mean something. -Jo March’ written on the back. I changed out of my cottage floral dress, and into a new t-shirt that says ‘Read books and fight the patriarchy’. I smiled when when I thought of how appalled twenty-year-old me would be at forty-year-old me.
“Twenty-year-old me, trying so hard to be holy...it’s okay. ‘It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.’ And at forty, you’ll understand how that matters so much more than the clothes you wear and how “submissive” you try to be. ‘Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.’ Thanks be to God.”
As I shared in an earlier part of this series on how I’m rediscovering what it means to be a Godly woman, there is a significant chunk of my life (from mid-teens to my mid-thirties) where the thought of promoting anything that said to “fight the patriarchy” would have been anathema to me. Especially in my late teens and twenties, I fell hard for the idea that a Godly woman was one who shut up, sat still, and looked pretty. I listened to the many men over the years (to clarify, my dad was NOT one of them) who communicated to me in various ways that of course that is how God views women and thinks they should act, and obviously xyz man knows better than me about that because, well, he’s a man.
So I stifled my strong God-given voice, and made myself smaller, because that’s what a Godly woman supposedly does. But…“You will know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:16a), and eventually, one by one by one, bad fruit outed every single man who had told me all those narcissistic patriarchal lies, either verbally or through a book/teaching or just through how they treated me/all women. And then the light started breaking in…
As I shared in another piece in this series, on how patriarchy as a belief system regularly views women as disposable. “It [doesn’t] matter the specifics, the disguised-in-spiritual-jargon conclusion is always the same: women are disposable. Some variants required the woman to look pretty and put together while continually pouring herself out without concern for her humanity, others were fine with the abase-yourself-into-the-sidelines approach. Regardless, the idea of a woman as a person with her own needs, thoughts, and ideas was repeatedly shot down. Many Scriptures were taken out of context to try to support this idea, but if you take a step back and look at how Jesus actually treated women, it would quickly become apparent that these ideas were not of Him.
“Just take any story of Jesus interacting with a woman: Mary Magdalene, the woman who bled for years, Martha, the woman caught in adultery, the woman at the well…it goes on and on. As is evidenced from the list, in many cases, the texts don’t often even name many of these women, but in every instance Jesus sees each woman for who she is. Her specific needs and individual hurts and unique struggles were evident to Him, and He responded to her out of that knowledge. Never, in any of the stories with Jesus interacting a woman, do we ever get the sense that Jesus viewed any woman as disposable, even though that would be the prevalent cultural mindset of His time.”
Looking back on the previous decades of my life, I’m realizing how so much of how I viewed myself was shaped by these fallible men’s ideas. No, I don’t hate men…but as human beings, they are fallible like anyone else. And many of them did completely fall, revealing that so many of these teachings that they claimed were from God were actually just ways to justify and spiritualize abuse.
So for the last several years, and as I move into my forties, I’m trying to let myself be shaped solely by how Jesus views me. Per the Scriptural stories I shared earlier, I don’t think that view is one of disposability and less-than-ness. And as I learn more about church history (so happy to have become Anglican!), I’m blown away by the women saints throughout history who served the Lord through their strength and boldness. Though it obviously needs to be submitted to Him, I’m recognizing that my strong personality and voice isn’t something that God wants less of, but something He gave me for His glory. He loves me, no caveats.
Earlier this afternoon, while I wrote my birthday Instagram post, tears filled my eyes as I remembered me of twenty years ago, and how hard she was trying. She desperately wanted to do what God wanted…and didn’t realize that all God wanted was her. Just like one of my favorite Jess Ray songs, “What If”, sums it up:
Why are you so afraid to fail What are you so afraid to lose If all of the love you've ever dreamed of Already belongs to you The door you're knocking on is open And you have been welcomed in The gate, the way is standing wide Never to be closed again What if everything is better than you thought it'd be? What if you have all you need baby? There's a place here at the table Nobody's gonna take your seat So, you can come and go as much as you need Be yourself and be at peace
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” (Galatians 5:1)
“What does it even mean to be a Godly woman?” series
Part One: I don’t know anymore
Part Three: On finding yourself in poetry
Part Four: On being an apple tree
Part Six: My issue with the “tradwife” movement
Thank you for sharing your unabridged experience Jess! The disciples recognized Christ for who He is when He fully offered Himself, and then recognized themselves as His body like at Emmaus when He broke the bread. You do the same when you write it all out! It helps me recognize who I am.